Infrastructure for the analysis of gene and protein expression in tissue-engineered constructs

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When tissues or organs become injured or affected by disease, there is often a loss of functionality, which can significantly impact a patient's physical and mental health. In general, traditional treatment methods, potentially involving extensive surgery or the use of synthetic implants that are prone to rejection, have numerous limitations. Through tissue engineering, investigators seek to create novel tissue substitutes, which will integrate into the body, promoting regeneration and restoring lost functionality. Currently, there are research groups around the world developing tissue-engineered constructs for most of the tissues in the body. One common strategy is to design a scaffold that will mimic the properties of the native tissues, and to seed it with cells that will contribute to the regenerative response. The cell-seeded constructs need to be extensively tested in the laboratory to try to understand how the scaffold environment influences the cellular behaviour. Ideally, the scaffold would direct the cells to organize and behave as they would within the human body. Researchers in the Human Mobility Research Centre at the Kingston General Hospital are currently developing and characterizing a number of tissue-engineered constructs, with a particular focus on soft tissues, such as cartilage or fat for reconstruction. To develop a much deeper understanding of the cell-material interactions in these constructs, it is important to characterize the genes that are being expressed by the seeded cells and to analyze the proteins that are being secreted under different experimental conditions. Such studies are required to develop optimized constructs that support normal cellular behaviour and will promote regeneration. This research is an important step towards transferring these tissue-engineering strategies to the clinic. The equipment included in this grant application is required for these gene and protein expression studies. Ultimately, the research conducted using this equipment will be of significant benefit to the healthcare system, by establishing novel regenerative therapies to economically treat numerous diseases, disorders, and traumas, without the need for extensive surgery.